Materialism and the Left: Remembering Marx

By Ted Keller, 21 February 1999

Make the ossified conditions dance by singing
them their own melody! Cause the people to be
frightened by their own image, in order to give
them courage!

Karl Marx

Behold, then, our glaring contradiction! For more than a hundred and
fifty years, from the time when Marx presented his unique theory of
politics and revolution, the Left of industrial nations has been
identified by the materialism of its inquiry. Yet, with rare exception
Leftists, including those who consider themselves Marxists, have
steadfastly avoided any materialist examination of their own
orientations or those of the publics to whom they address their appeals.
If prodded about the matter they become angry or confused, often finding
it impossible to comprehend what it is that distinguishes the
materialist analysis they so assiduously apply to their opposition.

Marx himself was crystal clear regarding not only the nature of
materialism but why most self-described Leftists of his own era
similarly neglected to use it on themselves. Indeed, his conclusions
concerning both issues were but logical extensions of his fundamental
propositions about the when, why and how of socio-economic-political
constancy and change.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a small but growing number of
individuals have proposed that while they would like to be Leftists,
there is no longer any genuinely Left paradigm for them to embrace, no
social revolutionary perspective which they might adopt. In the words of
writer Carolyn Chute, 'today there is only an up or down.' Others, e.g.
Nancy Mitchell of WORKERS' WORLD, have begun urging a recommitment to
materialism as the proper mode of investigation and understanding. His
present unpopularity notwithstanding, then, perhaps it is time to
remember Marx.

MARX'S MATERIALIST THEORY OF SOCIAL STABILITY AND REVOLUTION
Marx began by offering a tightly reasoned answer to the question that
preoccupied Thomas Hobbes and John Locke two centuries earlier: "What
binds people together in community?" Where Hobbes proposed it was the
force wielded by those in authority, and Locke believed we enter into a
"social contract" in order to protect each others' lives and
possessions, in Marx's opinion we are tied together by raw self
interest, an individualistic and assumed desire to preserve whatever
socio-economic status ("social existence" in his vernacular) we
personally enjoy. "Individuals seek ONLY their particular interest,"
wrote Marx. "It is NATURAL NECESSITY, the ESSENTIAL HUMAN PROPERTIES
however estranged they may seem to be, and INTEREST that hold members of
civil society together; CIVIL, not POLITICAL life, is their REAL tie."
(Marx's emphasis.)

Now, if we establish and pay allegiance to communities in order to
maintain our social existences, to the degree that some members of a
community have an elite status they will need to dominate the
community's practices in its defense. This, too, was one of Marx's
central conclusions. He believed it explained the very origin of
politics and the political state, concluding both would automatically
die if a genuinely egalitarian community ever came into being.

Surely, Marx's initial premises are supported by our common experience.
With nothing material to defend, the poorest citizens of every country,
north and south, east and west, rarely engage in political activity.
Unless coerced, most don't even bother to vote. Just above them on the
socio-economic ladder, people with low-paying jobs and a few material
possessions are slightly more politically involved. Next come
individuals with solid middle class interests who not only vote with
greater frequency but are more apt to make additional political
gestures; in the U.S., advertising candidates with bumper stickers and
window posters and driving friends and acquaintences to the polls. At
the apex of every country's socio-economic scale are the wealthy for
whom life is politics and politics life. "The elites", political
scientist Russell Neuman observed of American politics, "are ten times
as politically active. These findings, which are replicated in other
cultures, emerge as a central fact of political life."

It also follows that if people tie themselves to given communities
because their socio-economic existences are thereby sustained, insofar
as they cease to be sustained the allegiance will be broken. This, too,
describes the world we all inhabit. In their respective revolutions,
expropriated Russians left for Western Europe, expropriated Chinese fled
to Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, and expropriated Cubans moved to the
U.S., refusing to continue paying allegiance to their communities as
newly constituted. Today, American, French, German, British, Japanese,
etc., financiers and industrialists who have international material
existences to defend regard themselves not as citizens of any particular
country but of the world, and urge the establishment of a global
political authority.

Each productive order (way of producing and distributing goods), Marx
continued, is able to provide a finite number of people with a
particular socio-economic status. Again, he certainly told it like we
live it. If tomorrow Americans opted to return to an agricultural-elite
(feudal) existence we would obviously have to exile or kill around 60
percent of our people. An estimated 4 to 6 percent of the U.S.
population produces about 90 percent of our foodstuffs, using
sophisticated irrigation systems, tractors, plows and combines which
only an advanced industrial economy can provide. The foodstuffs are then
distributed via trains, planes and semis, which likewise require a
complex industrial order for their manufacture. Ditto with virtually
everything else we enjoy, including housing, clothing, medical care,
entertainment, and travel. In the same way, sustaining the social
existences of the French or English during the 16th century would have
been impossible if they had decided to raze their feudal systems and
revert to using a hunting and gathering order of production.

Marx, of course, started with the past and reasoned his way forward,
proposing the use of every specific productive order, including hunting
and gathering, semi-nomadic-slave, agricultural-elite (feudal) and
industrial-elite (capitalist) gradually gives rise to a subpopulation
whose social existences can no longer be sustained. Social conflict
invariably results, he observed, including intra-community strife, war
and, ultimately, revolution.

"Population" and "overpopulation," Marx proposed, are only relative
concepts. What is overpopulation for a hunting and gathering community,
for instance, is underpopulation for a community which utilizes the more
cornucopean feudal order of production. Marx made this particular
argument in GRUNDRISSE, writing:

The amount of overpopulation posited on the basis of a
specific production is thus just as determinate as the
adequate population. Overpopulation and population, taken
together, are THE population which a specific production
base can create. . . . The overpopulation e.g. among
hunting peoples, which shows itself in the warfare between
the tribes, proves not that the earth could not support
their small numbers, but rather that the condition of their
reproduction required a great amount of territory for few
people. Never a relation to a NON-EXISTENT absolute mass of
means of subsistance, but rather a relation to the
conditions of reproduction, of the production of these
means, including likewise the CONDITIONS OF REPRODUCTION OF
HUMAN BEINGS, of the total population, of relative surplus
population. This surplus /is/ purely relative . . .

(Marx's emphasis.)

Revolutions, Marx's paradigm instructs, only occur under specific
conditions: 1) A subcommunity must exist whose members have gradually
found it necessary to begin creating and enjoying a more bounteous
suborder of production in the very act of defending their social
existences. (E.g., the industrialist-elite subcommunities which formed
in feudal Britain and France.) 2) A stage must have been reached at
which further development of the more beneficient suborder of production
required to maintain them is no longer possible WITHIN THE EXISTING
socio-economic-political structure. 3) Engaging in internacine struggles
or participating in wars must have become costlier ways for them to
preserve their social existences than carrying out a revolution and
establishing the dominance of their new and more cornucopean productive
system.

Marx's logic explains why when WWI began Russians, including nearly all
the "Marxists," rushed to defend that nation's feudal order and the
Tsar. Only when the war was being lost and the economy collapsing did
revolutionary ideas become more than foolish romantic notions. So it
was, too, with the course of the Chinese revolution during and after
WWII. In our own hemisphere, Cuba underwent revolution only after a
10-year decline in per capita income brought the country's economy
virtually to a halt and no less disruptive way remained for supporters
of the revolution to be socio-economically sustained.

Thomas Jefferson said of humankind that we are "so conservative we
hesitate to change our institutions though all the world sees the
necessity for it, and even the opportunity presents itself." Marx
repeatedly made the same point, stressing the arch-conservative nature
of all politics, including revolution. "No social order ever
disappears," he contended, "before all the productive forces, for which
there is room in it, have been developed." "Men never relinquish what
they have won," he wrote:

but this does not mean that they never relinquish the
social form in which they have acquired certain
productive forces. On the contrary, in order that they
may not be deprived of the result attained, and forfeit
the fruits of civilization, they are obliged, from the
moment when the form of their commerce no longer
corresponds to the productive forces acquired, to
change all their traditional social forms.

Marx illustrated his argument by noting the conservative dynamics of the
overthrow of feudalism in England:

The privileges, the institutions of guilds and
corporations, the regulatory regime of the Middle Ages,
were social relations that alone corresponded to the
acquired productive forces and to the social condition
which had previously existed and from which these
institutions had arisen. Under the protection of the
regime of corporations and regulations, capital was
accumulated, overseas trade was developed, colonies were
founded. But the fruits of this men would have forfeited
if they had tried to retain the forms under whose
shelter these fruits had ripened. Hence burst two
thunderclaps--the revolutions of 1640 and 1688. All the
old economic forms, the social relations corresponding to
them, the political conditions which were the official
expression of the old civil society, were destroyed in
England.

In GRUNDRISSE, Marx described Rome's development of a colonialist and
slave-holding system using the indicated dialectical proposition that
new productive relationships and orders arise out of a conservative
effort to preserve already existing situations:

After the CITY OF ROME had been built and the
surrounding countryside cultivated by its citizens, the
conditions of the community were different from what
they had been before. The aim of all these communities
is survival; i.e., REPRODUCTION OF THE INDIVIDUALS
WHO COMPOSE IT AS PROPRIETORS, I.E., IN THE SAME
OBJECTIVE MODE OF EXISTENCE AS FORMS THE RELATION AMONG
THE MEMBERS AND AT THE SAME TIME THEREFORE THE COMMUNE
ITSELF. THIS REPRODUCTION, HOWEVER, IS AT THE SAME TIME
NECESSARILY NEW PRODUCTION AND DESTRUCTION OF THE OLD
FORM. For example, where each of the individuals is
supposed to possess a given number of acres of land, the
advance of population is already underway. If this is to
be corrected, then colonization, and that in turn
requires wars of conquest. With that, slaves, etc. Also
e.g., enlargement of the AGER PUBLICUS, and therewith
the patricians who represent the community, etc. Thus
the preservation of the old community includes the
destruction of the conditions on which it rests, turns
into its opposite. (Marx's emphasis.)

Marx reasoned it was this same conservative impulse which drove the
capitalist. In DAS KAPITAL, he observed:

. . . the development of capitalist production makes
it constantly necessary to keep increasing the amount of
capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking
and competition makes the immanent laws of capitalist
production to be felt by each individual capitalist, as
external coercive laws. It compels him to keep
constantly extending his capital, IN ORDER TO PRESERVE
IT, but extend it he cannot, except by means of
progressive accumulation. (Emphasis added.)

This, too, depicts our world. Since the 1970s, large corporations have
been rushing to establish production facilities in non-industrial
nations, reaping fantastic profits from the employment of workers often
paid as little as $.50 an hour. A greedy and aggressive underaking?
Business economists consider it axiomatic that manufacturers rarely take
this step until the rising tide of competition has begun threatening to
drown them.

According to Marx's paradigm, it is by virtue of its very structure that
the government of every viable productive order represents and defends
the order in all of its dimensions, including its particular
inequalities of social existence. As Marx put it:

Protection of acquisitions etc. When these trivialities
are reduced to their real content, they tell more than
their preachers know. Namely that every form of
production creates its own legal relations, form of
government, etc.

The State is the form in which the individuals of a
ruling class assert their common interest, and in which
the whole civil society of an epoch is epitomized.

Marx called subcommunities of individuals who fight to tear down
established productive orders, and their opponents who are still being
maintained by the existing orders, hence use force to defend them,
"classes," and his definition of "class" was likewise deducible from the
other axioms of his theory. For a subcommunity to constitute a class its
members must find it necessary to struggle against another community/-
class in defense of their social existence. Of the bourgeoisie
he wrote: "The separate individuals form a class only insofar as they
have to carry on a common battle against another class, otherwise they
are on hostile terms with each other as competitors."

Of the peasantry:

In so far as millions of families live under economic
conditions of existence that separate their mode of
life, their interests, and their culture from those of
the other classes and PUT THEM INTO HOSTILE OPPOSITION
TO THE LATTER, they form a class. In so far as
there is merely a local interconnection among these
smallholding peasants and the identity of their
interests begets no community, no national bond, and no
political organization among them, they do not form a
class. (Emphasis added.)

MATERIALISM vs. IDEALISM

While Marx agreed with Hegel that idea and experience (theory and
practice, knowing and doing) constitute "a unity" (i.e., our ideas are
mental representations of our experiences/interests, our experiences/-
interests the material bases of our ideas), he was in total
disagreement regarding which takes the lead. Like others of his era,
Hegel believed it is the birth of new ideas in people's heads which
prompts them to undertake new practices (consciousness leads). Where do
the new ideas come from? According to Hegel they're reflections in the
minds of humans of ideas being formulated by the "Universal Spirit."
Calling Hegel's "Universal Spirit" just another name for God, Marx put
experience/interest rather than ideas in the fore, arguing our new
socio-economic-political ideas arise defensively as we go about
protecting our material existences under conditions which the very
development of a productive order renders increasingly problematic.

"My dialectical method," said Marx:

is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its
direct opposite. To Hegel the life process of the human
brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which under the
name of "the Idea," he even transforms into an
independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world,
and the real world is only the external phenomenal form
of "the Idea." With me, on the contrary, the ideal is
nothing else than the material world reflected by the
human mind and translated into forms of thought.

Having argued what welds people together in communities and classes and
engages them in politics, oppression, war, revolution and counter-
revolution is the desire to defend their social existences, having
proposed idea and experience are a unity, Marx was logically bound to
determine social consciousness, including revolutionary social
consciousness, always follows rather than leads. Revolutionary logics
must be products of revolutionary situations, a revolutionary conflict
of material being. In his words:

Even if this theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc.
comes into contradiction with the existing relations,
this can only occur as a result of the fact that
existing social relations have come into contradiction
with existing forces of production. . . .

The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular
period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary
class.

If idea and experience are a unity and elites invariably protect their
hegemonic statuses by dominating community practice, logic further
argues the elites will dominate the community's self-knowing, its
consciousness, as well. That, too, was one of Marx's tenets.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the
ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling
material force of society, is at the same time its
ruling intellectual force. . . . The ruling ideas are
nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant
material relationships, the dominant material
relationships grasped as ideas.

Yet another syllogistic implication of Marx's theory is that insofar as
non-elite members of a community are being socio-economically sustained
they will think and act an acceptance of the elite's perspective. Not
doing so would put them in perpetual conflict with the latter, making it
difficult-to-impossible for any of them to have their social existences
preserved. In other words, we would expect the elite-dominated
consciouness of a viable productive order to constitute the community's
internalized (assumed and unchallenged) philosophy. That, of course, is
another of Marx's root propositions. Insofar as a new productive order
becomes viable (i.e., insofar as it becomes able to maintain nearly
every community member's social existence), he proposed its

Philosophy then ceases to be a definite system in
presence of other definite systems. It becomes
philosophy generally, in presence of the world, it
becomes the philosophy of the world of the present.
The formal features which attest that philosophy has
achieved that importance, that it is the living soul
of culture, that philosophy is becoming worldly
and the world philosophical, were the same in all
times . . .

Marx labelled the unexamined philosophical manifestations of a viable
productive order its "Spiritual Quintessence."

This feature of Marx's theory likewise characterizes our world. The
elites of feudal societies East and West justified their dominion with
Religious Absolutism, the belief that truth respecting both facts and
values was absolute, came from God, and arrived on earth via the elites
and high religious authorities; the "Divine Right of Kings" in feudal
Europe, the "Mandate of Heaven" in feudal China and Japan. In times of
crisis peasants would often question specific elite dictates. If the
crisis was profound they might even attack the king. But not until
agricultural-elite productive orders were becoming unable to sustain
them did nascent industrial-elites start to challenge the indicated
assumptions regarding what truth is, where it comes from and how it gets
passed around. Today, the same theocratic feudal logic is aggressively
propagated by raw-material and agricultural elites in the Middle East
and Africa: in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, by the Taliban in
Afghanistan, etc. Conversely, industrial-elites East and West--
self-described "Marxist" as well as anti-Marxist--justify their personal
dominion over community consciousness with Scientific Absolutism; the
conviction that while values are relative, social truth is absolute,
and, that "objective" individuals (who happen to be of and represent the
industrial-elite) armed with the "correct" perspective, and properly
trained by the appropriate institutions, are best able to determine what
it is.

That Religious Absolutism is the "Spiritual Quintessence" of the feudal
productive order becomes immediately obvious when one tries to imagine
building and maintaining a feudal society without it. For a week or two
everyone might "play along," with those who elected to be peasants
bowing to the dictates of priests and bishops, lords and ladies, kings
and queens just for the fun of it all. But if the system was going to
have any permanence, it would be imperative for everyone to internalize
the feudal logic, sincerely believing God had determined their
respective stations in life, who they were, what they thought and how
they behaved toward one another.

Important for those who dream of an egalitarian world, Marx's paradigm
argues that if there are individuals with elite social existences among
the members of a revolutionary class struggling to gain power, in
defense of their favored interests they will spontaneously/reflexively
assume control of the struggle, both its thinking and its doing:

Each new class which puts itself in the place of one
ruling before it is compelled, merely in order to carry
through its aim, to represent its interest as the common
interest of all the members of society . . . It can do
this because, to start with, its interest really is more
connected with the common interest of all the other non-
ruling classes. /i.e., the revolutionary elite's more
cornucopean productive order is better able to maintain
the social existence of those below it on the socio-
economic ladder./

Insofar as the productive order of a revolutionary elite is able to
preserve the social existences of non-elites the latter will internalize
its "Spiritual Quintessence" and guide their actions according to its
perimeters. One would therefore expect that, upon assuming control and
discovering any further movement in the direction of equality will be
expropriative of their own social existences, a new elite will promptly
cease being a radical force and its revolution will grind to a halt.

As Marx said of revolution:

As the main thing is not to be deprived of the fruits
of civilization, of the acquired productive forces, the
traditional forms in which they were produced must be
smashed. From this moment the revolutionary class
becomes conservative.

MARX ON SOCIALIST REVOLUTION

What Marx believed to be the requirements for an equalitarian revolution
can also be deduced from the other axioms of his theory. Since elites
spontaneously think and act control of a revolution, reflexively
producing elitist logics in defense of their special interests, a
revolutionary subcommunity (class) would have to be born which contained
no elite elements. In effect, a socialist revolutionary class would
ITSELF have to be "the expression of the dissolution of all classes,
nationalities, etc., within present society."

In order to develop an egalitarian perspective, the socialist
revolutionary class would also have to be on the bottom of society in
socio-economic terms. There could be no more deprived class against
which it would need to defend its interests. Anything the socialist
revolutionaries would have to defend, EVERYONE would have to defend. In
Marx's words:

A class must be formed which has . . . a universal
character because its sufferings are universal, and
which does not claim a PARTICULAR REDRESS because the
wrong which is done to it is not a PARTICULAR WRONG but
WRONG IN GENERAL . . . a sphere, finally which cannot
emancipate itself without . . . emancipating all . . .
other spheres.(Marx's emphasis.)

/The/ subsuming of individuals under definite classes
cannot be abolished until a class has taken shape,
which has no longer any particular class interest to
assert against the ruling class.

Since communities/classes only fight in order to keep, the socialist
revolutionaries would have to discover that the development of
industrial-elite society had created an unresolvable clash between their
increasingly cooperative and egalitarian forces of production and the
existing bourgeois relationships of/control over production.

For the oppressed class to be able to emancipate
itself it is necessary that the productive powers
already acquired and the existing social relations
should no longer be capable of existing side by side.

Finally, if new struggles were not going to arise over who would keep
and who would lose after the revolution, the productive forces of
society would need to have already been refined to a point at
which they were capable of producing in abundance, thus meeting
everyone's needs.

/T/his development of productive forces . . . is
absolutely necessary as a practical premise: firstly,
for the reason that without it only WANT is made
general, and with want the struggle for necessities and
all the old filthy business would necessarily be
reproduced . . .

Marx believed he was witnessing the formation of just such a class,
confronting precisely such conditions. In defense of their populations'
social existences, he held capitalist countries were extending their
material interests to the farthest reaches of the globe, creating a
capitalist world-economy controlled by an ever more internationalized
industrial-elite. As that stage developed, industrial-elites had begun
to find they could no longer protect their hegemonic social existences
by locating cheaper labor and raw materials in distant regions and/or by
vying with one another. As a consequence, they were drawing more tightly
together and further expropriating the likewise internationalized
working class their conservative efforts had created. Increasingly
dispossessed, members of this international working class were
recognizing that the full development of capitalism had not only given
them a common socio-economic existence, it had forced them to work
cooperatively in its defense, i.e., had socialized them.

Along with the constantly diminishing number of
magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all
advantages of this process of transformation, grows
the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation,
exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of
the working-class, a class always increasing in
numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the
very mechanism of the process of capitalist production
itself.

The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode
of production, which has sprung up and flourished
along with it, and under it. Centralization of the
means of production and socialization of labor at last
reach a point where they become incompatible with
their capitalist integument.

Thus things have now come to such a pass, that the
individuals must appropriate the existing totality of
productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity,
but, also, merely to safeguard their very existence.
/I/t becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any
longer to be the ruling class in society, and to
impose its conditions of existence upon society as an
overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is
incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within
his slavery . . .

Understanding they could no longer maintain social existence by
utilizing the industrial-elite order of production, Marx reasoned the
socialized working-class would organize, rise up and carry out its
revolutionary dismantling. Having done so, the political state and
political consciousness, those great protectors of socio-economic
inequality, would die a natural death. Only an administrative state
would remain. Marx described the reflexive construction of truths in
defense of elite interests that had gone before, along with their
uncritical acceptance by peoples whose social existences were thereby
sustained, as "pre-human history." With the socialist revolution, he
urged, aware of the non-egalitarian origin and function of prior
socio-economic knowing and doing, humanity would turn around, thereafter
establishing progressive goals and building truths for their
realization. Ideas would henceforth lead experience; as at long last
human history, directed not by elites opportunistically obsessed with
protecting their personal situations present, but by a species that
cooperatively dreamed, then built, a better and more humane future for
all, began.

THE PROMISE AND PROBLEMS OF MATERIALISM FOR THE LEFT

Think of the five analyses of U.S. policy you consider most radically
Leftist. Now identify the five most materialist expositions. You will
find they are one and the same, which is hardly a matter of chance. We
Leftists, quite simply, HAVE NO ALTERNATIVE when it comes to evaluating
our nation's foreign and domestic policies. Being Left means being
against an existential present. To be against the existential present
means judging by what is actually being done (by material practice),
rather than by the policy justifications (ideas) proffered by government
officials.

In the introduction to his brilliant critique of U.S. foreign policy
entitled KILLING HOPE, William Blum announces a commitment to
materialism in that work, writing: "I am declaring that American foreign
policy is what American foreign policy does." Blum proposes he will use
the same materialist methodology concerning practices of "the Soviet
Union, China, various communist parties, etc.," saying: "Emphasis is
placed upon what their bodies have actually done, not upon reference to
what Marx or Lenin wrote." "The Soviets like to be thought of as
champions of the Third World," he observes, "but they have stood by
doing little more than going 'tsk, tsk,' as progressive movements and
governments, even Communist parties, in Greece, Guatemala, British
Guiana, Chile, Indonesia, the Philippines and elsewhere have gone to the
wall with American complicity."

But if materialist analysis of our enemies is a requisite for we
self-styled Leftists, it produces downright unappealing conclusions when
applied to ourselves. Consider the behavior of a not-so-hypothetical
American political science professor who depicts himself as an
anti-imperialist. After giving a lecture condemning U.S. imperialism in
Central and South America the professor leaves the campus to buy a shirt
made of Brazilian cotton picked by peasants paid an exploitative wage.
Enroute to the department store he stops for an espresso made with
Colombian coffee, likewise picked by individuals he insists are victims
of imperialist exploitation. Finding a shirt he likes, he pays with a
check drawn on a bank that regularly finances corporations whose Third
World imperialism he decries. Next, the professor phones his wife,
utilizing the services of a communications industry he recognizes as
having vast exploitative Latin American investments. At his wife's
request, he then enters a supermarket to purchase bananas, products of
Conchita Brands imperialistic exploitation in Central America. Just
before heading home he mails a tax payment at the post office, part of
which his government will use to provide Latin American military
officers with the interrogation techniques and weaponry used to hold any
rebellious Latin American masses down. If our professor gave himself a
materialist definition, he would have to declare: "I'd like to be an
anti-imperialist, but it would cost more than I'm currently willing to
pay." Not a very happy proposition.

On the other hand, applying materialism to opponents (THEY ARE WHAT
THEY DO), idealism to ourselves and our friends (WE ARE WHAT WE THINK
AND SAY), not only enables we Leftists to maintain social existence, in
many instances it improves our material situations. Having neither
dependents to support nor mortgage payments to make, not yet tightly
bound to the existing system through remunerative employment, university
students are more open than other Americans, French, Germans, British et
al., to critical examinations of the industrial-elite productive order
which currently sustains us all. As a result, self-styled anti-
imperialist social science professors frequently find they have
larger and more enthusiastic classes than their conservative colleagues,
a distinct advantage when it comes to tenure and promotion. The books of
prominent Leftist writers have a profitable appeal for a sizeable
university audience; an audience which commonly invites their authors on
campus to make $2,000-plus presentations. In brief, at this stage of the
industrial-elite productive order's development, looking at ourselves
through an idealist rather than a materialist lens makes it possible for
we Leftists to endure, often prosper, while enjoying condescension for
our opponents and feeling good about ourselves. Hypocrisy has its
advantages for the Left as well as the Right.

Unfortunately, there are negative upshots to the practice described.
Unable to make material sense of situations and events examined through
an idealistic lens, we Leftists commonly embrace the most preposterous
declarations of government officials. Consider the Left's
characterizations of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, and of
post-WWII revolutionary movements in the Third World. His declared
materialism notwithstanding, William Blum presents the standard idealist
depiction of Russia's revolution and the West's response, intoning:

/T/he Bolsheviks had displayed the far greater
audacity of overthrowing a capitalist-feudal system
and proclaiming the first socialist state in the
history of the world. This was uppitiness writ
incredibly large. This was the crime the Allies had
to punish, the virus which had to be eradicated lest
it spread to their own people.

The absurdity of Blum's proposition becomes immediately apparent to
anyone who makes even a superficial materialist examination of the
Russian Revolution.

Socialism, not only for Marx and Engels, but for their contemporaries,
including those who railed against it, meant wage equality (Marx's "From
each according to his ability, to each according to his work.")
Following the failed Paris Commune Marx modified this definition
slightly, concluding for a brief time after a socialist revolution there
might be a 2-to-1 disparity of income, as practiced by the Communards.
From the outset, income differences in post-revolutionary Russia and the
rest of the U.S.S.R., as in "Communist China," were no less drastic than
those found in the West. Russian and Chinese industrial-elites, along
with their Communist Party political representatives/defenders, have
enjoyed ALL the usual perquisites, including fine food and clothing,
luxury automobiles and private planes, expensive art collections, deluxe
housing and vacation quarters, premium medical care, and an array of
social subordinates to serve them. This, while the working class
majority in both countries labored long hours, often under arduous
conditions, to secure a mediocre-to-miserable existence. And beneath
them a vast army of slave-laborers endured shortened lives under the
most brutally inhumane and oppressive conditions, in order to build
functioning industrial-elite infrastructures without diminishing the
status of the elites.

Not bothering to read Marx, self-styled Western Marxists have often
accepted U.S., Russian, Chinese, et al. equations of socialism with
state ownership and control of the means of production; a practice that
requires turning their prophet not only upside down but inside out. Marx
reasoned that whereas early capitalists were able to extract sufficient
profit (surplus value) from their workers to repair and expand
factories, their successors soon found they had to tap a larger source
of funding in order to build the grand-scale enterprises which
successful competition demanded. This inevitably led them to sell stocks
and bonds, producing a concomitant challenge to their control that Marx
considered "seeds of socialism."

Moreover, Marx observed, it was becoming imperative for some
capitalists to establish such huge productive networks that even the
sale of stocks and bonds no longer sufficed. They were having to draw
surplus value from virtually every citizen, and that meant bringing in
the state. State assistance had also become crucial for protecting the
industrial-elite's hegemonic interests against the rapidly expanding and
more unified work force, and against the predatory actions of one
another. However, Marx argued, this turning to the state did not make a
productive order any less capitalist, a point stressed by Engels in his
essay "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific."

/T/he transformation, either into joint stock companies
and trusts, or into state ownership, does not do away
with the capitalististic nature of the productive
forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts this is
obvious. And the modern state, again, is only the
organization that bourgeois society takes on in order
to support the external conditions of the capitalist
mode of production against the encroachments as well of
the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern
state, no matter what its form, is essentially a
capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the
ideal personification of the total national capital.
The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive
forces, the more does it actually become the national
capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The
workers remain wage workers, proletarians. The
capitalist relation is not done away with. . . . State
ownership of the productive forces is not the solution
of the conflict, but concealed within it are the
technical conditions that form the elements of that
solution.

For Marx, capitalist productive orders were by definition productive
orders dominated by individuals who derived and maintained elite social
existences through their control of industrial production. According to
his materialist paradigm, "industrial-elite societies" WERE "capitalist
societies", much as "agricultural-elite" and "feudal" societies were
one.

Viewing the U.S.S.R as more "socialist" than Western industrial-elite
communities has not only required the Left to focus on what political
authorities were saying, rather than what was being done, it has
necessitated ignoring the pre-revolutionary understandings of both
Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, along with the post-revolutionary analyses of
Lenin.

According to the Russian Marxists who began preaching revolution during
the 1880s, their country was a textbook example of Marx's thesis that
feudal societies spawn industrial-elite subcommunities whose social
existences can eventually only be sustained by tearing down their
agricultural-elite orders and building more beneficient and progressive
industrial-elite systems in their stead. They considered it a truism
that feudal Russia was about to undergo a capitalist revolution. So,
too, did members of the Menshevik and Bolshevik parties which arose out
of a split in the Socialist Revolutionary organization. What divided
Mensheviks and Bolsheviks concerned not what sort of society Russia was;
it was feudal. Nor did they disagree over what it would soon become;
obviously capitalist. Rather, their disputes concerned how long the
country would remain capitalist before experiencing a second, socialist
revolution; and how, as a consequence, Marxist revolutionaries should
behave after the capitalist revolution occurred.

The Mensheviks believed it would take a long time for Russia's
industrial-elite order to develop, exhaust its creative capacities, and
give birth to a socialist-egalitarian class that had to protect itself
by carrying out an anti-capitalist revolution. Hence, they proposed,
following the capitalist revolution Marxist revolutionaries should work
within the government to protect workers as the industrial-elite system
flowered. The Bolsheviks, conversely, expected Russia's progression from
feudalism to capitalism to socialism to happen quickly. They argued that
by transforming the country's relationships with Europe, capitalist
revolution in Russia would throw Western Europe's mature capitalist
systems into crisis, "sparking" (the Bolshevik newspaper was named
Iskra, "the spark") socialist revolutions on the continent. The latter,
in turn, would push capitalist Russia back into crisis. Aided and
abetted by West European revolutionaries, Russia would then undergo its
own socialist revolutionary transformation. Since the entire process
would be rapid, the Bolsheviks held that following Russia's capitalist
revolution Marxist revolutionaries should pressure the government from
without, just as they had done with its feudal predecessor.

When Russia lost a war with Japan in 1904 and its economy began to
collapse, both Marxist parties focused on convincing industrialists to
carry out the capitalist revolution. When that effort failed, the
Bolsheviks in particular decided they would have to lead the capitalist
revolution themselves. Ironically, when the revolution finally occurred
the Bolsheviks implemented the Menshevik program in aces, becoming,
rather than merely entering, the nascent industrial-elite order
government. By late 1917, Bolshevik spokesmen were already promoting the
opportunistic thesis that the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II in February
1917 and establishment of a provisional government constituted Russia's
capitalist revolution; their own seizure of power in October its
socialist transformation.

Lenin, however, continued to describe Russia as engaged in building a
state-capitalist, rather than a socialist productive system. The U.S.,
England and France had no serious competitors when they constructed
their industrial-elite productive orders and were able to go about it
gradually, he reasoned. Russia, on the other hand, would face stiff
competition from mature capitalist nations and must either establish
large-scale industries quickly or fail to survive. Being late comers to
capitalism, Japan and Germany had confronted the same dilemma, Lenin
noted. When the Meiji Restoration destroyed Japan's feudal structure in
1867, Japanese industrialists immediately understood that building a
competitive capitalist economy would require rapid industrialization;
and that, in turn, necessitated getting financial assistance from
virtually every citizen by way of the state. So, Japan established a
state-capitalist order. Under the direction of Otto von Bismarck, a
unified Germany had to make the same accelerated transformation from
feudalism to capitalism a few years later. Recognizing it could only do
so by obtaining government assistance, Germany became even more
state-capitalist than Japan. Russia, Lenin emphasized, would have to
adopt the same state-capitalist policies. He argued it was Russia's
small and medium-sized entrepreneurs, not its capitalists, who
threatened to impede the country's progress. Challenged by anarchists
and other strident anti-capitalists, in June 1921 Lenin declared:

The alternative (and this is the last possible and only
sensible policy) is not to try to prohibit or put the lock
on the development of capitalism, but to try to direct it
into state capitalism. This is economically possible, for
state capitalism--in one form or another, to some degree
or other--exists whereever the elements of free trade and
capitalism in general exist.

Can the Soviet state, the dictatorship of the proletariat,
be combined, united with state capitalism? Are they
compatible? Of course they are. This is exactly what I
argued in May 1918. I hope I proved it in May 1918. Nor is
that all. I then proved that state capitalism is a step
forward compared with the small proprietor (both small-
patriarchal and petty-bourgeois) element. Those who
juxtapose or compare state capitalism only with socialism
commit a host of mistakes, for in the present political and
economic circumstances it is essential to compare state
capitalism also with petty-bourgeois production.

The whole problem--both theoretical and practical--is to
find the correct methods of directing the inevitable (to a
certain degree and for a certain time) development of
capitalism into the channels of state-capitalism; to
determine what conditions to hedge it round with, how to
insure the transformation of state capitalism into
socialism in the near future.

In order to approach the solution of this problem we must
first of all picture to ourselves as distinctly as possible
what state capitalism will be and can be in practice within
our Soviet system, within the framework of our Soviet
state.

At the time, Trotsky remarked that only Lenin had the courage to make
such an admission. Most Bolshevik authorities had already begun
defending their hegemonic social existence, and that of the nascent
industrial-elite, with the argument that Russia was building a
classless, communist society, an idea which contradicted virtually every
tenet of their idol Marx's logic.

Marx's paradigm, of course, argues there was not the remotest
possibility Russia would have a socialist revolution in 1917. It had
none of what Marx described as preconditions for that kind of
transformation. Moreover, vis-a-vis the country's peasants and
industrial workers, with few exceptions, the Marxist activists had elite
statuses to protect. Whereas the average Russian had 3 to 4 years of
schooling, many Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, including nearly all the
party leaders, were college educated. Most peasants and industrial
workers lived in poverty, whereas Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were in
general middle class or above.

To be sure, many Bolshevik Party founders lived austerely and had deep
ideological commitments to equality. However, following the revolution
they soon found themselves losing their former authority. When the Party
seized power it had approximately 23,000 members. By 1922 that figure
had soared to over 700,000, as individuals with elite social existences
to protect discovered they had been "communists" all along and flooded
the party's ranks, assigning more dedicated and egalitarian "Old
Bolsheviks" pen-pushing, busywork to do. Then, as the 1930s began, with
the country's fledgling state-capitalist economy devastated by the three
years of civil war which followed the revolution, and now hammered by a
deepening international depression, most Russians drew together behind
Stalin and the party bureaucracy, electing to maintain their social
existence and that of the industrial-elite by killing or enslaving
20-plus million peasants, along with a few thousand others who had
sufficient humanity and courage to open their eyes, see what was
happening, and protest.

That China's political authorities are also directing the construction
of a state-capitalist productive order in the name of socialism and
communism is today so blatantly obvious it would be pointless to make an
elaborate argument. Visiting China in 1975, John Burns, of Toronto's
GLOBE AND MAIL, was already reporting:

Curtained limousines, sumptuous banquets, exclusive
recreational facilities, access to special shops,
privileged seats on trains and aircraft, salaries five to
ten times that of the average worker--such are the
perquisites of authority in China, where the Party is
forever caricaturing the inequalities of life in the
capitalist West . . . . A foreigner has to wonder
when he sees middle-echelon cadres arriving for a
football game at the stadium in a Mercedes-Benz 289 SE.

As San Francisco State Speech and Communications professor Hank
McGuckin more recently observed:

Some of us may remember that when student demonstrators
were gathered at Tiananmen Square to protest gross
inequity, and corruption among the Party's leadership and
venture capitalists so beloved of George Bush, we heard
the students singing the Communist International--and we
saw the tanks sent by the Party leadership to crush them.

A materialist can accept the claims of Russian or Chinese political
authorities that their revolutions were necessary and progressive, that
they occurred because both countries had reached the point at which a
rapidly-growing majority of their populations could no longer maintain
social existence unless they dismantled their feudal structures and
industrialized. But, agreeing to call the way they have gone about it
"socialist" or "communist" makes about as much sense as concurring with
a drunk who pronounces himself a teetotaler and vegetarian as he
staggers from the local saloon eating a roast beef sandwich. To a
materialist, the two countries ARE WHAT THEY DO, and what they have done
has, from the very beginning, been capitalist to the core.

THE CONSERVATIVE CONSEQUENCES OF IDEALIST THEORY

We Leftists want to change the world. But to change any material
situation one must first understand its material operation. Finding U.S.
Third World practices odious, from the late 1950s to the late 1980s the
American Left internalized the government's definition of events, then
tilted against its conclusions. Our authorities claimed we were fighting
Soviet-instigated "communism" in Castro's Cuba, Allende's Chile and
Ortega's Nicaragua, insisting if we failed to do so all of Latin America
would soon be lost. Having accepted the government's definition of
Castro, Allende, Ortega and the Soviet Union as "communist," the Left
could only feebly reply that perhaps a little communism would be good
for the hemisphere. As a consequence, we appeared weak-minded or
weak-willed to Americans in general, in view of the brutal oppression
known to be occurring in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China.

A materialist analysis would have been far more compelling. It would
have entailed exposing the operational meanings being given to
"socialism" and "communism" by peoples for and against; i.e., defining
what they MEAN by what they DO. To the antis, "those policies and
programs are socialist/communist which are expropriative of my social
existence, and the more they would expropriate me, the more they are
socialist/communist designs." In acting upon that definition Latin
American landholders have with clear conscience oppressed, tortured and
slaughtered peasants, priests, educators and anyone else who posed a
material threat. In defense of U.S. agricultural, raw-material,
communications, maquiladora and banking interests in Latin America and
other Third World regions our government has done the same; our policies
toward Iraq revealing there is apparently no limit to how barbarous we
are willing to become.

For the industrial-elites of China and the former Soviet Union, on the
other hand, as for their progressive sub-elite counterparts in Latin
America, the Middle East and Asia, "those polices and programs are
sufficiently socialist/communist unto the moment which sustain my social
existence. Policies, programs and their supporters which threaten a
diminishment of my interests are 'capitalist' or 'leftist adventurist,'
depending upon the direction from which they come, and are to be
energetically, if necessary, brutally opposed."

Had the U.S. Left been consistently materialist in its analyses it would
have concentrated on puncturing our government's ludicrous pretension
that its reactionary and oppressive anti-Soviet, anti-China and Third
World policies, including the trillions spent on weapons systems, had
something to do with battling socialism/communism. It would have hailed
Castro, Allende, Ortega, for their progressive expropriation of the
foreign raw-material interests which throttled their countries'
economies, while condemning the oppressive and elitist activities of
their own regimes. It would have welcomed the U.S.S.R.'s attempts to
bring industrial development to the Third World, while reminding them
they were doing it to keep their own industrial-elite system solvent.

Marx predicted that as the industrial-elite productive order grew
increasingly disfunctional and a socialist-revolutionary class
developed, here and there individuals with more elite interests would
grasp what was happening and go over. We Leftists often give the
impression we see ourselves as of that breed as we concentrate on
accusing capitalists for the ills of the system. However, Marx's logic
makes it evident that any individual who joins a socialist-revolutionary
community in formation will spend as much time on confession as on
accusation. It was not capitalists who Marx's paradigm depicts as the
enemy. It was the capitalist productive system, and its day-to-day
preservation is something for which we are all responsible.

One of the most worrisome things about the U.S. Left's idealism is that
while our country's practices are becoming increasingly fascist at home
and abroad, we go on deluding ourselves we will be able to turn things
around just through the presentation of our ideas. Bemused to find most
Americans support our government's genocidal policy toward Iraq and our
oppressive anti-drug operations in Latin America, we assure ourselves
it's because they have been propagandized, then we begin to shout ever
louder. Without question, our elites spend a lot of time and money
producing and propagating the ideas required for their socio-economic
defense. But, as Marx insisted is the case with all elite-manufactured
logics, Americans in general accept them out of mundane self-interest,
not because they are "brain washed." The Left has apparently forgotten
that when millions of young middle-class Americans discovered their
social existences no longer being sustained by elite logics in the 1960s
they created alternative publications, RAMPARTS, ROLLING STONE, THE
VILLAGE VOICE, THE BERKELEY BARB, 7 DAYS, a revived MOTHER JONES, Paul
Krassner's THE REALIST, etc. It has forgotten that when modifications in
the economy provided the rebellious youths with secure niches once
again, editors of the indicated periodicals found they would either have
to sing the industrial-elite's songs like other media, or, fold. Some
attempted the former, but having nothing different to say, most of those
soon ceased publication. The others disappeared virtually overnight.

As observed at the outset, thus far the Left has pragmatically resisted
abandoning its idealistic interpretations of events. In an email
discussion with the author, William Blum changed his mind about why the
West was so opposed to the Russian Revolution, saying it was actually
"because of the capitalists' very material investments that they were
worried, not the idea per se." However, Blum found distinctions between
materialism and idealism "abstract" and "uninteresting" and not
something he was willing to discuss.

Perhaps most alarming of all is the rememberance of what our
counterparts in Germany did under circumstances very similar to our own.
As their country descended into fascism in the late 1930s, with the
economy rapidly improving and their disruptive ideas falling on deaf
ears, many German Leftists enthusiastically put on brown shirts, while
the majority fell silent and went along, comforting themselves it was
not their fault. They tried to warn everyone. But, alas, the
propagandized masses had simply refused to listen.